Politico today ran a piece on Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell – the president’s special envoys – suggesting that both men are facing more difficult challenges in their jobs than originally thought.

Mitchell, of course, is the former Senate Majority Leader from Maine, and will forever be known as a peacemaker due to the Northern Ireland peace accords. He was given the difficult task of attempting to resolve the unresolvable – the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in the holy land.

Politico reports that both men are now facing questions about their role in the administration’s foreign policy, and the ultimate chance of success for their respective missions.

Politico:

When President Barack Obama announced his appointment of Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell to be his special envoys to two of the world’s most challenging trouble spots at a formal ceremony with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last January, it almost seemed the new Obama administration was getting three secretaries of state for the price of one.

[...]

Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader who helped negotiate the Northern Ireland peace accords, would bring his soft-spoken talents and diplomatic mien to the cause of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which Obama emphasized would be a goal from his first day in office.

[...]

But almost a year later, neither Holbrooke nor Mitchell is looking as confident about his status in the administration or prospects for success.

[...]

Mitchell, who has kept a lower profile and brought on only a half dozen aides, has not tried to circumvent the State Department’s regional bureaucracy. But throughout a year of exhausting shuttle diplomacy to the Middle East and European capitals, he has not been able to achieve the major task Obama assigned him: getting Israelis and Palestinians back to the peace table.

The problem may not be any lack of resolve, talent or hard work on the part of either man, but the envoy system itself, a system Obama embraced early in his administration before it had been particularly well thought out, according to some experts.

[...]

While recently Holbrooke has served more in a policy planning capacity for Clinton during the long strategy review on Afghanistan, Mitchell is still the main actor for the administration in the Mideast, conducting its shuttle diplomacy between the various parties.

While Mitchell’s preference for operating below the public radar, avoiding the media, and not antagonizing the bureaucracy has resulted in minimal friction with the White House, diplomatic and regional experts note that Dennis Ross, President Bill Clinton’s Mideast adviser and now a senior NSC official, has recently played a larger role in Middle East peace process discussions at the White House.

“Mitchell is so gracious,” the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Miller said. “He is not going to create bureaucratic problems. He doesn’t believe in it.”

What eludes the administration on the Mideast issue is a successful strategy, and it’s not clear who will be responsible for coming up with it.

“The Arab-Israeli issue is still not the essential foreign policy issue for the administration, which means the fights and stakes are less,” said Miller. “We are not talking billions of dollars and hundreds of American lives. What they need is a strategy. Everything else flows from that.”

Interesting.

Essentially what they are saying is that Mitchell has been less of a pain to the White House than Holbrooke, but that he still has been unable to acheive even the most basic incremental step of peace in the middle east – getting the two sides to the negotiating table.

It also appears that the administration is struggling to come up with a specific methodology in how to go about formal diplomacy in these problem areas.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, NSC point man Dennis Ross, and Mitchell are all involved in the issue, but seem to be suffering from a lack of direction or perhaps clear lines of responsibility.

Additionally, as the article points out, for all of its troubles, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not high on the totem poll of foreign policy objectives right now – especially with Obama’s new push for a military buildup in Afghanistan.

So only time will tell if Mitchell will continue to be mired in quicksand.  It would be a shame to see one of Maine’s most distinguished statesmen have his talents go to waste.

Popularity: 1% [?]